I was raised to believe that failure to write grammatically and spell correctly are practically immoral. I was in college before letters were replaced by 'phone calls. When my siblings or I wrote a letter home, our mother was excruciatingly critical and pointed out all errors. Later, she complained that we didn't send her letters; I wonder why. Even now, I proof-read everything I write, even including posts here, although not quite so carefully as if I were writing a formal dissertation.
It seems that what is considered to be proper English usage is determined by how the hoi polloi use it rather than by how highly literate people used it before it became corrupted. For example, "healthful" and subjunctive mood have practically disappeared. People forget that some words are contractions and should be preceded by an apostrophe. Examples: 'phone, 'bus, 'cello. They also do not understand that "agenda" is plural and that "agendum" is singular. Similarly, "condominium" is singular and "condominia" is plural. Fortunately, there are still some people who get "data" and "datum" right and correctly say, "data are."
Samuel Johnson wrote the first English dictionary in the 18th century; it is available from Amazon.com. Presumably it was written before English became corrupted by the hoi polloi. I am seriously considering purchasing it to enable me to upgrade my usage of English to a higher standard.
astonished. I thought you had a degree in something that would require a lot of writing!
